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This latest work is populated with characters pursuing fresh starts, attempting to leave behind addictions or harmful partnerships, only to find hope curdling into aggression. Kraus repeatedly invokes the phrase "clean slate", transforming it into intentionally weary through its repetitions. Sentences like "He aimed to start over" and "They opted for a clean break" recur in the text. Meanwhile, Kraus herself is embarking on her individual reinvention, since this seems a new kind of book – fact-based, truly literary. Yet it reveals itself to be packed with the same dilemmas and styles as earlier books.

From Accidental Writer to Renowned Book

Kraus began as an creative who transitioned to writing unintentionally with her 1997 seminal work I Love Dick, which was composed of letters to an unreceptive lover, converting confessional female writing from self-debasement into assassination. She kept producing books, but the following three engaging and challenging novels lacked the impact and rawness that the epistolary style brought to the narrative voice of I Love Dick. Compounding this was her position as a maverick maker who had become a large-scale low-rent landlord, so there was considerable focus on real estate deals. It is logical that she presently aims to explore different types of content, looking outwards to other people's stories, at a period in which she states that contemporary political climate turns intimate literature obsolete.

Several Eras, Collective Unavoidable Background

The Four Spent the Day Together is divided into three sections, spanning three generations – all unable to escape their histories. The book includes the story of characters Emma and Jasper, representations of her own mother and father, moving from the Bronx to a pastoral setting. Additionally the story of Kraus herself, in the character of a figure named Catt Greene, reckoning with the delayed acclaim of I Love Dick, the rise of Trump, and her addict husband her husband Paul. The third thread involves the narrative of a homicide of one directionless individual by another in a town long abandoned by forward-thinking policies only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

For this reader drawn to honed writing of the kind Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

Being a reader who favors precise prose of the variety that the author tends to eschew, I was seduced by the literary tone of the opening segment. There is a new quality of attentiveness that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the young Catt pries out of frozen water at the beginning of the narrative, helped by her adored dad. "I found an ice toy!" she declares; "a lovely toy", he responds, "the nuanced interpretations of terms tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". The author narrates Emma's narrative with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not precisely her dream."

Disappointment and Disjunction

I was fated to feel let down when I wished this different style could persist to the end. The author states here that she resents the enjoyment those who appreciate polished prose have gotten from I Love Dick; she's committed to disjunction, to the unpolished style she echoes from her hero author Kathy Acker, and the void and recurrence of her past books reasserts itself in the second segment. Catt is attempting to do up three dozen dilapidated units in the most troubled areas of Albuquerque while moving between the Midwest and the West Coast, unable to aid Paul control his drinking. She experiences powerlessness as Paul moves between underfunded jobs as an recovery specialist in a society propelled by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. Multiple pages are devoted about Catt being cancelled on a platform, her professional designation altered from "writer" to "landlord" on Wikipedia. Kraus still seems to be overly concerned about this. At one point she says that she's investigating the murder so that before leaving Minnesota, "she could potentially understand something about an America that her online critics would fail to comprehend, would not even perceive".

The Killing Story

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the titular day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his companions. Kraus utilizes great source material, and details moment by moment what occurred as a man named Brandon came to visit Brittney after meeting her on an app where she offered adult photos. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day alongside her friends, loitering getting his car mended and funding treats and narcotics, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend a man named Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has frequently been hospitalised for fits of anger.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards responsible documentation and audacious rule-breaking clash in this segment. Yet I wished her to explore more thoroughly her personal fixations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid in part due to Catt's identification with her – yet another intelligent, harassed young woman spiraling out of control in a difficult, overlooked locality. Kraus notes that Catt speaks to Brittney in detention, but she doesn't dramatise these conversations. The whole section feels curiously unresolved, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par